Zhihu, a content consumption platform.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Pinwancool” (ID: pinwancool), author: Li Hezi.
“I remember a few years ago, about 14 years ago. When you open Zhihu, you can still see many professional academic issues, but now I feel that I have been watching others talk about my life experience and various other issues. Duanzi, why is this?” A user asked in Zhihu.
This is a lot of people who “care about” Zhihu, and now they “question” Zhihu most often, but in fact, the answer to this question is also very simple:
To make money.
So, the more interesting question is actually, how does Zhihu make money from these “stories”?
Now when I open the Zhihu App, we often receive titles like “Can you tell me a sweet and sweet love story?”, “What is the scariest story you have ever heard?” or “So far , Which is the best mystery novel (article) you have ever read?” and so on. The click-in response is usually a fictional story with obvious emotion, horror, or reasoning.
And when we read it with relish for a while, the text will gradually become lighter, as if it is leaving you, and then a line of bold blue text will pop out:
“At least 0.3 yuan/day to open a member, view the full content.”
In addition to Zhihu’s own platform, social platforms such as Weibo and Douyin have also begun to see a large number of bloggers recommending similar content-Zhihu who once taught you “how to use Weibo/ Douyin for drainage”, Now I am also practicing the answers to these questions myself.
The Weibo emotional blogger “Wan Nan Shuo” with 6.86 million followers will share the fictional story under Zhihu’s problem in the form of screenshots every day, and leave a message in the comment area. How to search for the original text in Zhihu; Douyin user “Book Digest” will also publish the story content from Zhihu, and will also guide users in the comment area. Zhihu will have hundreds of comments and over 10,000 likes under most of his posts… After being diverted to Zhihu, the next step is usually a familiar operation-advise you to open a membership.
But it’s worth noting that there is also some gray content in these addictive stories. For example, the author “Story Archives”, who is often selected as the author of the Zhihu Salt Selection column to pay for reading, has written content such as murder, infidelity, and pornography that are not suitable for minors to read.
This kind of “grounded gas” drainage method is in contrast to the “professional and academic atmosphere” image of Zhihu that the questioner said at the beginning, but this approach is bringing growth to Zhihu. This “you can only watch half without spending money” operation has become Zhihu’s latest money-making password.
Zhihu’s revenue comes from three parts of its business, online advertising revenue, paid memberships and commercial content solutions. Advertising has always been the mainstay. However, in the latest quarterly earnings report, the overall revenue increased while online advertising revenue accounted for The ratio dropped to 45%, the income of paid members increased by 127% to 127 million, and the number of paid members reached 4 million, a year-on-year increase of 138%, and the penetration rate of 85 million monthly active users reached 4.7%.
Zhihu did not disclose how many of these increased users came for “reading novels”, but the increase in marketing expenses in the latest quarter may reflect Zhihu’s investment in this model that requires Weibo Douyin to drain traffic. : Zhihu’s marketing expenses have increased from 125 million yuan in the same period last year to 346 million yuan this year. The explanation given by Zhihu is due to a series of tenth anniversary brand activities.
Users who are familiar with Zhihu may have felt that Zhihu’s attitude towards fictional content is slowly changing over the years. In fact, the story content has already taken root in Zhihu. Many people may be impressed by the famous high praise stories “War of the Gods” (published in 2015) and “Artisan” (published in 2016) on Zhihu. The “Story Vending Machine” column created by users in 2015 was also an outlet for many people to pass the time, and the traffic was considerable.
Just because of the “natural conflict between the story and Zhihu Gene”, Zhihu did not initially support such content too much. There have been media reports that the creator of the “Story Vending Machine” column had hoped that Zhihu would pay more attention to this column, but the final communication was not successful.
Zhihu’s attitude towards story content has changed with its commercialization process.
Like station B and Kuaishou in the early days, Zhihu, which gave priority to community cultivation, was once very Buddhist. The performance is that in the first few years of its establishment, it was very cautious on the road of commercialization, and at the same time, it would not treat the big Vs on the platform differently. Knowing that CEO Zhou Yuan also insisted that “a lot of traffic is not necessarily the case. What is a good thing, I think the community must have its own rhythm”-even in 2018, Zhihu still banned the platform’s top V Zhang Jiawei for 7 days for privately receiving advertisements.
However, the Buddha’s attitude towards commercializationThe department once brought a crisis to Zhihu. Because they can’t make money, and the current limitation issues complained by various big Vs, many big Vs have chosen to leave several times, including many story content creators. There are not a few story creators that Zhihu has accumulated so far. It finally realized this when Zhihu finally decided to let go of commercialization. For Zhihu, the road to commercialization in the future cannot be without them.
However, in the initial stage of commercialization, Zhihu seems to have not found the best way to get along with story creators.
2016 is recognized as the first year of Zhihu’s commercialization. This year Zhihu began to accelerate various commercialization attempts with the upsurge of paying for knowledge. However, it is difficult to say how smooth the journey has been. Zhihu’s earliest commercialization attempt in 2016 included the launch of a native advertising system, online value-based, Live and other paid-for-knowledge projects, to help outstanding creators gain revenue, etc. However, three years later, according to media reports, since the start of commercialization, Zhihu More than 90% of revenue comes from advertising, and knowledge services have not yet created scale returns. As a knowledge-sharing community, Zhihu is still obsessed with getting income directly from content.
Membership became the next attempt to place Zhihu’s hopes on it. It was also the launch of membership that allowed Zhihu to find a way to give full play to the value of story creators.
In 2019, Zhihu launched salt selection members. Its predecessor can be understood as the “Reading Club Member” and “Super Member” launched by Zhihu University in 2018. Later, Zhihu University Business Department was renamed Zhihu The membership department, Zhihu also reorganized the membership system. After the membership of Yanxuan went online, the membership business was listed as one of Zhihu’s strategic development goals, and it is expected to become an important source of revenue for Zhihu like the advertising business.
The rights that Yanxuan members can have
Yanxuan members have ushered in a good momentum of development. One year after it went online, Zhihu announced that the number of paying users has increased by 4 times year-on-year, and that “a complete closed-loop ecosystem has been formed.” Some users have earned more than 200,000 yuan in a single month through the creation of the “Salt Selection Column”. Membership is Zhihu’s second largest source of income at present, and it has a tendency to catch up with advertising revenue.
It is also from 2019 that Yanxuan members launched, Zhihu began to truly release the signal to embrace the story creators. This year, the first season of Zhihu Story Contest was held, and until now, Zhihu is also continuing the “tradition” of this story writing contest-the “Marathon Long Article Essay Contest” is now in the registration and creation stage. Also inIn the “Member” tag of Zhihu App, the “novel” category is also placed in a very obvious position.
Know about the award setting of the “Marathon Long Form Essay Contest”
As the story content was included in the salt selection members, Zhihu began to find his own password to make money. In many cases, users may not purchase members directly from the membership page of Zhihu App. Instead, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, they will make “impulsive consumption” because they want to continue reading an answer. And the easiest thing for users to “impulse consumption” is undoubtedly the human content such as fictional stories.
This is indeed Zhihu’s unique sales method. Moreover, this method is also easy to attract users who may not originally be readers of online literature, and perhaps a considerable number of users have the underlying psychology: reading novels in Zhihu sounds more advanced than reading novels in tomato novels.
For Zhihu, the story content may also carry the hope of its “sinking”. Although Zhihu is no longer a niche product, according to the user portraits given in the prospectus, 52.6% of Zhihu users are still concentrated in first-tier or new first-tier cities, and 21.2% are located in second-tier cities; and there are also public information before that, Zhihu users are still mostly engaged in the professions of product managers, programmers, engineers and designers. Users in the more sinking market are still unfamiliar to Zhihu. If you can win more sinking users, Zhihu will also be able to unlock new stories.
Or going further, Zhihu can still use the original stories on the platform to create IP and authorize it. At that time, Zhihu’s financial report’s income structure may have more “content distribution”.
This kind of grounding gas drainage and refreshing is giving Zhihu a taste of the sweetness. Although those basic principles Zhihu users will still question the changes in Zhihu; although Zhou Yuan will continue to work hard to emphasize knowledge-the first quarter financial report At the conference call, when asked “Where does the growth of MAU come from”, Zhou Yuan exhausted materials science, microeconomics, animation, digital, games, postgraduate entrance examinations, food and workplace, etc., but did not mention story content, but These are all “wishful thinking” in a sense.
Today, I will discuss whether Zhihu is a serious knowledge community or a story meeting that makes up stories. It doesn’t really matter anymore. Whatever you like to watch, you will rush to the content, wherever you can make money, creators will also gather, and content of different styles and tonality can also exist at the same time-Zhihu is a “content consumption platform”. Here people can find what they want to consumeRong is enough. And Zhihu must choose to let himself live first. Now this wealth code looks very useful.